It's hard not to listen to outlines of the smart connected future we're facing and go "EEK! Dragons!" This is particularly true in the context in which these predictions are being made: caught between the Snowden revelations of endemic electronic spying and the UK government's censorship plans.[more...]

Evil - or benign - file-sharers checking in on The Pirate Bay this week discovered the site had vanished. Hours later, it was back via a domain registration in the Ascension Islands; today it's woken up in Peru, apparently at rest for now. TorrentFreak reports, however, that the next phase will be different: The Pirate Bay will circumvent the domain name system entirely. The plan is for a standalone browser and plugins for Chrome and Firefox that will turn the entire system into P2P, taking the process of decentralization that began with the takedown of Napster to the next level.[more...]

What with one thing and another, net.wars failed to mark November 2, 2013 as the 25th anniversary of the Internet worm. Probably its author, Robert Tappan Morris, Jr, would have liked for the whole world to fail similarly. Instead, he got to be one of the first to discover what life is like in the Age of the Internet, when it's increasingly hard to lose your past mistakes in the mists of time. Especially when those mistakes represent a watershed moment in the development of a globally adopted technology.[more...]